With 2015 now well underway you may have finally convinced yourself to startup your own blog or website. More and more individuals each year are building blogs, even those who may not possess any web design or development skills. With so many blog and website building platforms out there, just about anybody can get involved in the world wide web. Nevertheless, with websites being so easy to churn out and produce it can often mean that there are many other websites and blogs competing for the same viewers or potential customers as your blog.

With the countless number of blogs currently out there, and all that high quality content and information readily available for viewers and potential customers to lap up, how do you make your website or blog stand out above the rest? It’s surprisingly incredibly easy. Take a look at these 4 simple steps and allow your blog to blossom in this new year:

1. Produce blog content that is relative to your target audience.

To avoid throwing away and wasting your time and marketing budget on individuals who may not be your target audience, you first need to conduct some research. It’s important to consider who your target audience is, if you are looking to attract new visitors to your car dealership website (for example), the content that you publish and offer would therefore need to be car-related in some way. You wouldn’t want to provide content about healthy eating if you were a painter, as this would attract the wrong audience to your blog. Remember, if your content isn’t interesting, informative, entertaining or useful, your audience will simply leave your website and head over to your competitor.

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2. Be unique, honest and transparent.

Avoid being a sheep in the world of blogs and content. Avoid using rewritten articles that have been done over, time and time again. Produce new exciting content that isn’t just a cheap spinoff from somebody else’s article. Because once an individual has read one thing, they won’t necessary want to read it again, with a slightly different spin on words.

Be original with your content and also honest. When you write content for a specific audience (keeping in mind some of these individuals may be professionals at what you do too) they will see right through you if you are bending the truth or if you clearly don’t know what you’re writing about. Your readers expect you to provide information and typically solutions, so do that. But be unique and honest!

3. Get involved in guest blogging.

To drive additional traffic to your website or blog, a method known as guest blogging has become incredibly popular over the past decade. If you have a solid piece of content that you believe will draw in plenty of readers, but you currently don’t have the traffic to your own blog to convert those readers into potential customers, then it’s time to post your article onto a website that receives numbers of visitors a day.

With so many unique and often genuine visitors visiting a particular site at any one time, there is a higher chance that your article will be read. Of course, with any guest blog, it’s important that your article is relative to the website in which you wish to post it too, and also don’t forget to include a backlink to your own blog. This can help drive traffic from one site to yours; especially if readers enjoyed your content so much and are looking for more!

4. Get on board with social media marketing

With social media becoming more than just connecting with friends and family, businesses and bloggers have jumped on board the social media marketing train with many thanks to social media platforms (such as Facebook) that offer bloggers and businesses an arsenal of tools to help them project their content to the audience that matters. Take advantage of all the free opporunities, create social profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter.

5. Ratings and Reviews

Did I say 4 tips? Well… make that 5 with this bonus tip.

Signup on review sites such as Yelp, Angie’s List, Google+ Local, MerchantCircle, Yahoo! Local Listings, CitySearch, Bing, TripAdvisor. They allow users to rate and review businesses, and you should be an active participant. Do your best to always offer your best service or best quality product, be honest, be transparent, communicate with your followers.

Remember that if you do something good, 1 out of 10 people will talk about it. If you do something wrong, the other 9 people will tell to as many people as they can.